Who wouldn’t want to work for Apple? Their executive board for that. Well Google CEO Eric Schmidt felt a way while working for Apple. Check out his comments after the jump.
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Google exec Eric Schmidt did more this week than intimate that his company’s acquisition of Android manufacturer Motorola is more than merely about patent protection. He also divulged that he “couldn’t stand†being on Apple’s board of directors while he was a part of it, a group which consists of former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, Genentech CEO Art Levinson, former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, and others (new Apple CEO Tim Cook was on Apple’s executive team at the time but not yet on the board). Schmidt’s remark offers the first instance of first-hand insight into the ostensibly awkward period in which Google’s then-CEO was also sitting on Apple’s board, at a time when Apple was launching the iPhone while Google was secretly prepping its competing Android OS.
The Schmidt quote from PC Magazine is open to interpretation out of context. Is it that he personally couldn’t stand the likes of Jobs and company, or the way in which Apple’s board operated on a corporate level? Or is that he couldn’t stand being torn between the two partners as they gradually dissolved into mobile rivals. Perhaps he couldn’t stand being racked with guilt over having seemingly two-timed Apple, hanging around during the iPhone development era and then taking that information back to Google. The old Sean Connery quote “You’re playing both sides†comes to mind. But while it’s not clear just what Schmidt was referring to with his quote, it’s not the first time a rival has managed to penetrate Apple’s secrecy cloak in broad daylight…
The Schmidt-Apple saga has distinct overtones of a generation ago when Bill Gates from scrappy upstart Microsoft managed to get Jobs to give him Macintosh prototype units under the guise of developing Microsoft apps for them. Gates delivered on that promise, but he also delivered his own Windows computer operating system, whose ideas were stolen rather blatantly from those Mac prototypes. A spurned Apple sued Microsoft, but after internal struggles Jobs was gone from Apple soon thereafter anyway, and a limp Apple failed in its legal efforts along with its market efforts for the next decade. While Jobs appears to have been burned by Schmidt and Google in a similar fashion inasmuch as Android was crafted at a time when Schmidt was privy to sensitive iPhone development information, this time Apple’s response was quite different…
Rather than suing Google, Apple opted to boot Eric Schmidt off its board of directors. When the lawsuits began, rather than going after Google for what might have been a harder to prove case, Apple instead sued most of the major Android hardware manufacturers – not for using the Android OS, but for hardware designs which looked shockingly similar to Apple’s own iPad and iPhone hardware with the screen turned off. Apple may well have gone after these companies regardless. But the fact that Apple has succeeded in getting Android-based products banned from store shelves in one nation after another must be giving Jobs and company some measure of satisfaction whether the lawsuits were inspired by revenge motivation or not. And that’s true even if, by his own admission, Schmidt couldn’t stand being a part of Apple in the first place.
